Peter Stormare

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Peter Stormare

Birth name	Peter Ingvar Rolf Storm
Born	August 27, 1953 (age 53) Arbrå, Sweden
Spouse(s)	Karen Sillas (divorced), Toshimi Stormare
Notable roles	Gaear Grimsrud in Fargo, John Abruzzi in Prison Break, Wolfgang in the " Un-pimp Your Auto" commercials for Volkswagen

Peter Stormare (help·info) (born August 27, 1953) is a Swedish film and television actor. With his fluency in English and his skill for mimicking accents, he has become much in demand in Hollywood productions, where he usually plays Europeans of various nationalities and often of dubious morality. Many of Stormare's characters are highly eccentric.

1 Biography
2 Filmography (selected)
3 Discography
4 See also
5 Footnotes
6 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Stormare was born in Arbrå, Sweden as Peter Storm, but changed his name when he discovered he shared it with a senior student at the acting academy. His original choice of name, Retep Mrots (his own name spelled backwards), was rejected. Just like storm (a word which means the same in Swedish as in English), "stormare" is a Swedish word, meaning "stormer".

[edit] Career

Stormare began his career with the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which he belonged eleven years. In 1990 he took a leading position (Associate Artistic Director) at the Tokyo Globe Theatre and made a name for himself through various Shakespeare performances including Hamlet. Three years later, he went to New York and mainly took part there in English language productions. In Sweden, he has worked with Ingmar Bergman, by whom he was apparently discovered. He has also played Carl Hamilton, a fictional Swedish secret agent similar to James Bond.

He was critically praised for his role as a quiet and ruthless villain (with Steve Buscemi) in Fargo (1996), and later played a sleazy, unlicensed "eye doctor" ("Solomon Eddie") in Minority Report. He portrayed Dieter Stark in the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park. In 1998 he appeared in "The Frogger", a Seinfeld episode where he played a "rogue electrician" known as "Slippery Pete". He also portrayed Uli Kunkel in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, as well as playing Lev, the Russian Cosmonaut in 1998's Armageddon, and Alexi in the 2003 summer blockbuster Bad Boys II. In the 2005 film Constantine, Stormare played Lucifer. He played an interrogator in the 2005 movie The Brothers Grimm. His first major character in television was on the show Prison Break in 2005, where he played John Abruzzi.

He also was the voice of Mattias Nilsson in the videogame Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, the voice of Isair in the computer game Icewind Dale 2 and the voice of Johann Strauss in Quake 4. In February 2006, he starred as "Wolfgang" in Volkswagen's VDub series of television commercials. He is once again voicing Mattias Nilsson in Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

Stormare is contracted to play the main character in the Swedish upcoming movie "Svartvattnet", which is going to be filmed in Sweden and Norway during 2007.^[1]

[edit] Personal life

Stormare lives in the United States as well as Sweden. He is separated from his first wife, actress Karen Sillas, with whom he has a daughter named Kelly. Currently, he is married to Toshimi Stormare.

Stormare is also a musician. After Bono of U2 heard some of Stormare's music, he encouraged him to make an album and in 2002, he released his first album, Dallerpölsa och småfåglar. Stormare is the godfather of Gustaf Skarsgård, the son of equally-acclaimed Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, and plays in a band called Blonde From Fargo.

Stormare runs his own record label, called StormVox.